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Whether you are looking to advance your marks, change directions, planning ahead will help you stay focused. Planning is significant as it directs us on how to tackle the year ahead. We just need to be flexible, acknowledge that our plans will have to accommodate for some uncertainty.

Review the past year

Before you can plan for the year ahead, you need to review the year you have just had. And don’t only assume everything was awful.

• Acknowledge the victories, mistakes, experiences that grew your skills, and those that didn’t.
• Look at what moved you forward and what held you back. Write these details down so that you can use them to make a strategically sound plan for the year ahead.
• Identify three large wins and three areas that needed work.
• Look at how you spend your time through the year – did it align with your goals and what didn’t.

Establish a routine

Aristotle once said, “we are what we repeatedly do”. Routines are conscious ways of doing things repetitively and in a specific order. For example, waking up at a certain time every day and sleeping at a certain time, having coffee, going to class, going to the gym and studying for an x amount of time. Creating routines is important because they help promote self-care and create healthy habits. Having a routine can lead to happiness and fulfillment because we can accomplish the most important things to do vs the urgent things.

Having a routine and sticking to it is incredible, however, you should give yourself time. Productive habits take time to develop. If you are too hard on yourself, you might never have the chance of enjoying the benefits of a routine. Your success depends on how seriously you take your routine.

Create a schedule – daily, weekly and monthly

• Write down all the important dates and deadlines you know for the year. Some you might not know immediately but as you find out, keep filling in the dates.
• Write clear and measurable goals.
• Create a specific action plan for each goal.
• Think about big quarterly events and schedule those too. It helps you to plan your week in advance instead of scrambling for time to get everything done. It also helps with delegation too.

Avoid procrastination

You are more likely to procrastinate if you don’t have a set plan or idea. If you know what you need to do and by when, then it makes it easier to eliminate most distractions. By limiting the number of distractions around you, you’re more likely to get done what you need to do. Shut your phone off or set it on flight mode, retreat to a quiet place and listen to classical music, study in the library as opposed to your room where you might be tempted to sleep in your room.

Work on a side hustle

Even if you’re a student, it’s okay for your plans to include sheer enjoyment and recreation. Without distracting your studying, exploring your passions and interests can help you learn new skills and techniques that might not be taught in a traditional workplace. And who knows, it might also help advance your career.

The beautiful thing about side hustles is that they encourage creativity, self-development and confidence.

Reward yourself and celebrate your accomplishments

It’s very important to attach an incentive to complete a task and perhaps incorporating this in your planning might help. After studying for a test or completing an assignment, consider giving yourself a reward. It could be as simple as, “Once I finish this assignment, I can watch an episode of my favorite show.”

In the previous post, we unpacked what it means to remain accountable to your goals. Beyond that, it equally important that we learn to become accountable to ourselves and those around us. By definition, accountability is the ability to reliably deliver on commitments and showing others that you can be trusted to do what you said that you will do.

Accountable to yourself

Self-accountability on the other hand means that you are responsible for your choices and actions. You are the first and last line of defense for your integrity. Self-discipline is your primary method for improving your life, pursuing good things because you desire them. You have set your course and are committed to success.

 The following are ways to remain accountable to yourself:

• Write everything down

This might seem like a simple task but it can be extremely instrumental in helping to remain accountable to yourself. Write all your goals and tasks – short term and long term. A trick that can help is writing your to-do-list on a sticky note and placing it all over your laptop, room wherever is most visible and then throwing them away as you complete your to-do items. It will be extra tough resisting the will to complete a task if they stare at you in the face.

• Identify your personal mission statement

Similarly to how businesses have mission statements, you also need to have your own mission statement. This comprises of your purpose. It simply needs to define you as a person and define what you are working towards every day. A simple example of a mission statement could be, “Live life to the fullest, stay focused and leave a legacy for women in sport”. Recite it every morning until you fully identify with it, once it ignites passion and fire in you then you know that you’ve found your mission in life. The constant reminder is also another way to enforce the commitment to living your life in a manner that upholds your personal mission statement.

• Create micro-goals

Identify smaller goals that you can begin with, and commit to achieving each one at a time. This keeps you more accountable in terms of the overall success of the goal. Experts argue that taking action every day that brings you one step closer to achieving your goal is one of the best methods out there. This incremental approach is favourable because it is more sustainable in terms of morale unlike setting only macro goals that might not always be achievable in a realistic timeframe.

• Learn to reward your accomplishments and milestones

This step might come as a surprise to most of you but contrary to popular relief, attaching rewards to goals can be one of the most exciting components of accountability. Knowing that you once you accomplish a certain goal, there is a reward on the other end that has high chances of making the task of completing that goal more enticing.

• Evaluate your performance

Being accountable to yourself means being brutally honest with yourself. This requires constant reviewing of how well you were able to apply your accountability skills because, at the end of the day, it is you that is responsible for your goals. If you want to remain accountable, keep yourself in check so that you can find other strategies and alternative paths if your performance is not up to par.

Accountable to others

Accountability also means that you might be called on to explain yourself to others. No one can live entirely disconnected from other people. You have various relationships with others like parents, friends, neighbors, teachers, bursaries and scholarships, co-workers and teammates. So, in addition to self-accountability, being accountable also means you are willing and able to give an honest account of your conduct to those who ask you.

Let’s be honest, being objective about your conduct can be hard, therefore being accountable to others can help you become aware of your blind spots and challenge you to get out of your old routine.

Additionally, being accountable to others does not mean you demean yourself or think you are a failure. Accountability is a positive thing when you desire to improve your life. These are the benefits of being accountable to others:

1. It increases your commitment to completing the goal.
2. You are able to share the success of your celebration.
3. Promotes clarity in stating your goals and action plan.
4. Reporting of success and setbacks along the way can help you focus on solutions to keep you moving.
5. Provide valid explanations for the choices and actions you have made and ask for their perspective and advice when you are not sure what to do next.

Self-accountability can help you push forward toward significant and lasting improvement in your life. And being honest with accountability to others can increase your motivation and likelihood to succeed. Hold yourself accountable for your choices and actions, and be accountable to others so that you can live your life well!